Thursday, 1 December 2016

Big Finish Reviews+ Whispers of Terror by Tony J Fyler

Whispers of Terror

Ssshhh, says Tony.

Question: What does
ambition sound like?

Answer: Sounds like
Whispers of Terror, that’s what.

For a company at the
beginning of its journey to bring Doctor Who into the audio medium, Whispers of
Terror is an almost ridiculously brave or foolhardy endeavour – a story using
all the tricks up your audio sleeve, in which you actively invite the audience
to pay extra special attention to those tricks, because it’s in those tricks that
the villain lives, and where solutions can be found to every question asked.
It’s the equivalent of saying ‘THIS IS WHAT WE DO…pay close attention to how
well or badly we do it.’

It also goes above and
beyond to deliver a villain that expressly works better on audio than it would
ever do on TV, a setting out of the Big Finish stall that was later to be
delivered in a similar way by the Eighth Doctor classic, Embrace The Darkness.
If you were just three stories in to listening to these cracking new audio
thingummies, this one gave you a brisk slap across the face, just to make sure
you were really listening, and then it blew your hair back with invention and
characterisation, to essentially kiss you better.

Whispers of Terror takes
the Sixth Doctor and Peri to the Museum of Aural Antiquities – old recordings,
to you and me. It’s interesting to note that while the Sixth Doctor appeared in
the very first Who story from Big Finish, The Sirens of Time, in that first
story, he’s already much mellower than he was on TV. Not so much here, when
paired with Nicola Bryant’s Peri – here it’s very much business as TV-usual,
because, to be fair, if it had been anything else, people would have lost
interest, claiming it wasn’t true to the TV version of this especially spiky
pair. If anything, writer Justin Richards makes them extra-spiky here, just to
give the audience a double-shot of classic Sixth Doctor action.

Richards’ story of a dead
actor who was just about to launch a shoe-in bid for the presidency when he
apparently killed himself, and the consequences of his death, is a pleasingly
deceitful one, seeming at first to be a base under siege, but having its
motivation in affairs and events outside the Museum (slightly perversely,
there’s never an actual nation named, nor a planet on which the Museum sits, but
Richards and the cast ramp up the intensity of the political importance
anyhow). It’s almost as though in an Agatha Christie story, somebody died in
the big city, and their body was then driven out to the country and dumped in
the library to be investigated. If a base under siege story can act as both a
metaphor and an unstoppable Rubicon of conquest for a particular kind of
villain, then Whispers of Terror achieves this double whammy, reflecting the
external pressures and politics of the nation and the planet within the walls
of the Museum, and building the battle of the Museum into both a first strike
and the first domino in a fall into inevitable destruction. Clever, ambitious
plotting and a brisk pace of escalating stakes mean you really don’t ask some
of the obvious questions, like why an actor would be a particularly certain
shoe-in for the presidency, or how he could have had the foresight to try what
he tries (an event that leads to all that happens in Whispers of Terror), or if
he did
have that foresight, why he didn’t do anything more straightforward, certain
and, shall we say, life-preserving than what he did. You don’t generally think
about these things unless you’re faced with the idea of assessing the story
critically and writing a review of it – at the time, it all seems perfectly
reasonable, you’re so wrapped up in the tangled threads of the mystery.

Similarly, assessed with
critical ears, there are a couple of fairly ropey 80s cliff-hangers in the
style of ‘No, no, nooooooo!’ and ‘I really think this could be the end’ in
Whispers of Terror, people screaming in agony, and then carrying on with their
normal conversation immediately afterward, and those you’ll notice as you
listen. Annnnd if you want to get really critical, there’s a sense that this
story could be over and done with by the end of Episode 2 if it wanted to be,
with the second ‘half’ more or less an extended semi-sequel to the first, bringing
more of the political drama of the planet into play, and giving us plenty more
potential suspects at whom to point a finger.

All that said, Whispers of
Terror is tightly whipped along by director Gary Russell, and tightly framed in
terms of its scenes and sequences. One or two shocks you hear coming, but
there’s almost an invitation by the script to do precisely that, to hear them
coming before the characters do, which could be said to be the key to any
successful thriller mystery – make the audience feel at least as clever,
perhaps just slightly cleverer, than the investigator, while still throwing
them curve balls to keep them updating their premise of what really is going
on.

In terms of ambition,
there’s also the cast list to consider, which includes TV’s Nyder, Peter Miles,
who surely has one of Classic Who’s most recognisable voices, and an early
non-Benny role for Lisa Bowerman, showing her dramatic chops as political mover
and shaker, Beth Pernell.

Big Finish has been
rightly credited for a kind of rehabilitation of the Sixth Doctor, allowing
Colin Baker to deliver in audio the journey he’d had in mind for the TV
version. But as Baker knew in the 80s, and neither fandom nor the
powers-that-be at the BBC had the patience to understand, these things take
time. Whispers of Terror, his first ‘Sixth Doctor’ audio Who with Big Finish
(as opposed to the multi-Doctor Sirens of Time), delivers exactly what it needs
to – a reminder of the starting point, the loud, brash Sixth Doctor of fan
memory from which he can eventually mellow. It puts us immediately back in
touch with that TV version of the Time Lord, but delivers a story that’s almost
infinitely better for being made in the audio format. It combines the tight
claustrophobia of a base under siege story with the wider political
machinations of a world under much more threat than it knows, (and, not for
nothing, seventeen years on, it still feels fresh and relevant when it talks
about politicians who believe the concept of democracy is feckless and that
their right to rule supercedes any such notions). It invites the listener to
listen harder and by delivering on the technical aspects of audio production,
it disguises any cracks and joins that may be there, allowing the listener to
focus on the tight and escalating sense of threat. It brings then-new audio
voices to the fore in the likes of Bowerman, and matches them with superb and
well-tested voices like Miles to deliver a rounded, believable, seemingly
effortlessly real world. And above all, it proves that Colin Baker and Nicola
Bryant together are still a workable team when translated out of their
presumably visual comfort zones into the audio universe.

Still, almost two decades
on, you can listen to Whispers of Terror with baited breath, and while the
Sixth Doctor and Peri have changed over the intervening years, it still feels
true to their TV origins, so it delivers a hit of televisual nostalgia that
makes you want to pull out your DVDs of the likes of Vengeance on Varos and
Mark of the Rani.

If you’ve never listened
to Whispers of Terror, fill in the gap in your knowledge today. If you have, give
it another spin – it may well surprise you with how much it delivers.